[00:00:15] Ghazenfer: 

Hello and welcome to the Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders to talk about the bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journey.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. We do it in two ways. First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations. And second, by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs and business owners create innovative software products from SaaS platforms, web and mobile apps.

A big part of our focus is in healthcare, where we help tech companies to build secure HIPAA compliant applications. If you’d like to learn more or work with us, head over to technology rivers.com and tell us about your project. Today’s guest is Philippe Neil. Philippe is a serial entrepreneur, strategic growth advisor, and investor with a proven record of scaling businesses to eight figure exits.

With over 15 years of experience, he has built and scaled multiple businesses across diverse industries, achieving eight figure exit with his first venture where he generated $70 million in a founder-led sales and 30 million ebitda. Navigated complex international markets and formed strategic partnerships with Fortune 500 companies.

Philippe is a power connector, part strategic, visionary, and wholly dedicated to shaping the future of deep tech. He brings expertise in deep tech, AI, aerospace, international market, and has helped countless founders structure revenue strategies, secure partnerships, navigate mergers and acquisition. Philippe, welcome to the show.

We’re thrilled to have you on Lessons from the Leap. Just start with your background,where you’re from and where you grew up. Just give us a brief intro and then, we’ll talk about your journey to that 70 million that we have been listening to a lot. 

[00:02:24] Philippe: 

Perfect. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, and so, well, my journey was pretty much covered in your intro, but what I could say is I’m a French Canadian.

I live in Quebec, Canada. I was born and raised here. Most of my business now is in the United States, the rest of Canada. And a little bit, you know, everywhere in the world at the end of the day, mostly in Thailand. So I really appreciate doing international business development.

My story is that I became an entrepreneur through this first business that I pivoted and grew to 70 million before exiting, and then I became a senior entrepreneur and entered a venture capitalist. Eventually, through building a technology company, I discovered something that changed what I wanted to do as an entrepreneur.

My mission before I always wanted to master the process. Gained the skills, gained the leverage so that I could create companies following a proven process that I can have impact. Once I failed with my technology company because of founder burnout, then I started to pay a lot more attention on the inner journey of entrepreneurship.

And today I’m leading a new company that I call the Founder’s Compass. Which focuses on mapping out that inner journey and building founder readiness so that we build a world where founders won’t break and we can actually deliver the impact we always inspired to deliver. 

[00:03:51] Ghazenfer: 

Cool. So, your company, Beck’s Medical, grew to 70 million.

What was the secret sauce like that was enormous, that high growth in such a short time. 

[00:04:07] Philippe: 

Yes. 

[00:04:08] Ghazenfer: 

Is there anything you can share with our audience?

[00:04:11] Philippe: 

Absolutely. So, this was my second venture. The first one doesn’t really count. It was a business where I was trying to build a website for a social mission driven company and I realized I don’t know enough. I have been in business development for almost, I don’t know, seven or eight years with big companies, and I still didn’t have enough understanding of entrepreneurship to do it on my own. So I partnered with these guys, part-time, right? 

We were four partners, all equal shares, all just doing the work, acting as a service company, as a purchasing department for a local health center. We called ourselves EMD two, which became neo backs after the pivot. And what happened is just me and the accountant was really actually working in the company. Most of us were kind of just, you know, meeting once in a while to decide. 

We were getting to a point where it was a lot of work for very little margin.But we were growing steadily and so we kept pushing through. We had an internal agreement that made sense. When COVID hit, we almost went bankrupt  because we couldn’t buy any more supplies. We couldn’t act as a distributor purchasing department for these local hail centers. We were put on allocation, so we couldn’t order more than the average of the last 12 months of our purchases because the manufacturers wanted to focus on making larger margins to the bidder and government.

Because we had bootstrapped the company, we didn’t have a ton of cash on end. We couldn’t gamble by buying an inventory, you know taking the risk. And we didn’t have any knowledge on how to import. How we were able to scale was that I saw that everybody was rushing into medical masks, but I also understood that they were easy to copy.

And having been for the past year or so, in the medical supply space. I was fortunate enough to see another medical disposal that was a very popular nitro glove. And this was much harder to copy. You cannot produce nitrile in your backyard, right? So I decided to try and niche down on nitro gloves.

I was able to make my way to speak to a buyer at the government side which you know. Educated me on the process of RFQ public tender, and I was able to negotiate my way into a first contract, which became the new positioning of her company and that first contract was a crazy story. I can get into more details, but in a nutshell, the pivot.

Really was the way forward to scaling this company cause that first contract became a 10, a 17 million contract, a $35 million contract. It became a contract with Sacramento County in California. Health pro and we just scaled following the demand. 

[00:07:11] Ghazenfer: 

Cool. Absolutely. I think. Finding the niche is key.

And I think whatever you found that helped you grow fast. That’s amazing, I think that’s the harder part. How do you find that? And you nailed it. Congratulations! So you talk about the entrepreneurial shadow. Can you walk us through a time when you personally faced this and how do you overcome it?

[00:07:38] Philippe: 

Yeah, so this is something that took me. Almost, I guess five years to figure out. It wasn’t something I understood at the time. So I approach it from a reflective lens more than something that I knew along the way. But now that I have clarity, I can see how it affected, both my luck, misfortune and outcomes.

So when you, when I first scaled that business, for example, immediately we fell into a founder conflict and that founder conflict destroyed our leadership.We couldn’t make decisions because of it. We made mistakes that led to a $5 million fraud. We lost a big contract. We almost went bankrupt after getting that high.

So a bunch of crazy stories, right? The core of it was we’d never monitor our state of entrepreneurial shadow. And if you wanna understand the entrepreneurial shadow, you have to start with simplifying the battlefield of emotions that you have to deal with as an entrepreneur.

So we all know emotional intelligence is important, social intelligence, and there’s a thousand emotions for entrepreneurs. I believe we are visited by the same storm over and over. I call that the shadow of entrepreneurship which is uncertainty, fear and unworthiness. So feeling of imposter syndrome, fear of failure, uncertainty over your direction and decisions.

These three emotions, if they’re not seen, if you don’t know how to navigate them, create reactivity, which is the first push on the domino of startup failure, which is losing capacity to sustain decision quality. So if I go back to my story of the conflict, well, unworthiness was a big underlying narrative that we never resurfaced.

My partners felt like they needed to become. Successful entrepreneurs and build a big sustainable business that would outlive them if they were to be wordy of their identity that they were chasing. And so they were leaning towards immediately structuring the business, getting, you know, treating it as if it was a real business, but it wasn’t yet.

It was just a system that I was working during a crisis time and the risk was enormous. If you want to crystallize a system in a market that is volatile and changing every two months with growing, organized crime presence, you know, making everything more complex, you should not take too much risk of crystallizing your processes, right?

There’s a time for flexibility and a time for stabilization. And so because they didn’t feel like they would be. That was a big need for them. We overextended buying too much inventory, which when we lost the $300 million contract later, well we had paid with money that was due for income tax. So we were in big trouble.

We had to convince a full refund of a million boxes of gloves from one manufacturer just to survive and get a chance to, we ended up having a sustainable business and it’s still in business right now, five years later. But,we went, we pulled it off. I don’t know the expression in English, but, I guess the hair, you know it was pretty close.

So uncertainty affected the way we were discussing. One of the other symptoms of unworthiness, I mean manifested.We had a physician in the group and for him, he had always been seen as high status, right? Now that he didn’t really understand what was happening, that it was, I was mostly me in the spotlight.

He was taking it really badly. So he wanted to attack my sense of worth, so that it would regain that prestige, right? And so these underlying emotions drive the narratives that manifest as symptoms of founder conflict, missing  product market fit, all these misalignment that you would read in a Harvard Business Review report.

Are just symptoms of a deeper root cause what I understood through many repetitions of not seeing that’s an example of unworthiness. If I can talk about myself and then I can stop there cause I know I talk a lot, but because of that conflict my own sense of word was really triggered and that all needed to prove myself, made me think, made me fail

Reached a crossroad of transformation after my exit which I should have taken and become a full fledged investor. But because I still felt I had something to prove to myself, I overstretched myself as a stereo entrepreneur and then began, you know, starting buying. I had high Irish pubs in Thailand.

I have a construction company in Thailand. I have almost invested in a skateboard company. You know, I’ve done a bunch of different things. All add barriers to entry, all add logical reasons to kind of, okay, that might make sense. And I had money so I could stomach the risk, but because it came from an emotional need more than anything else, and I didn’t understand that, well, the second I step into uncertainty or fear, because early startup, that’s the day-to-day of an early stage company.

Then everything turns to fire, right? So that is what I mean by the entrepreneurial shadow, when these emotions come and visit us. And if we don’t see them, we slowly move from uncertainty to fear, to a sense that, hey, maybe I wasn’t even cut out from the start. Then we approach the crossroad of the failures of entrepreneurship.

[00:13:44] Ghazenfer: 

Well, these are really good insights. I think I’m sure of the listeners. We’ll take some benefits out of this and as people are working on their entrepreneurship journey. So, one thing that I noticed like many founders struggle with including myself struggle with knowing when to pivot versus when to persist.

How do you know the difference between a challenge to overcome and assign to change the direction? 

[00:14:14] Philippe: 

So I don’t think there’s a clear cut formula. You can have formulas per industry that are more clear cut, like if certain metrics fall into a certain threshold, it could be an indicator. But ultimately I think it has to do with intuition, intuitive attunement and maintaining your mental clarity so that you can actually feel that intuitive whisper and not confuse it with a fear response.

If I go back to my first pivot, I could feel like there was something to explore in gloves I didn’t know for sure. I just felt it, and so I took action and took a little experimentation, steps into having conversation to gather new data that I couldn’t read anywhere because of course.

Nothing online or in any database or in any CMS would let me know business intelligence software or anything like that would let me know where I should pivot. In that context, it would’ve just told me to pull the plug. But because I felt that whisper without knowing, it was a whisper of intuition and I took action, I could clarify that, and then slowly opened my eyes to the path that I should take.

But it takes a little bit of aimless courage. To test things out until you find something that has potential to stick. 

[00:15:42] Ghazenfer: 

Cool, what’s something most founders get completely wrong about scaling internationally? Because that’s where you have a unique pitch. Because obviously within the United States, within the country, rules are different as you go international things are different.

[00:16:02] Philippe: 

Yeah.

[00:16:03] Ghazenfer: 

How do you see those differences? 

[00:16:05] Philippe: 

So I’ve approached it through bridges of trust. There’s many, it is way more risky because you don’t control everything, right? So if you compare a new entrepreneur to a seasoned entrepreneur, the new entrepreneur is in the unknown all the time.

The experience an entrepreneur has, stable ground in the quick sand of entrepreneurship that you can walk on. Well, if you step outside your known territory, you go back to the quick sand in many different ways. Now that I’ve been through many countries, I can see some of the patterns that I should be looking into, but it is still outside my comfort zone and my control.

And so how you read people, how you can manage your risk, this is something that people underestimate. They think that they can. Find one or two advisors and they’re gonna take care of it for them. But the truth is you will have to expand the solid ground that you can walk on by flying over there once in a while, validating, getting your own knowledge and experience and understanding, and as well rely on trusted sources and build these scaffolding of trust slowly so that when you take a decisive action.

You understand the risk you’re taking and you can minimize the downside so I would say in a nutshell that the risk management is what people underestimate. 

[00:17:37] Ghazenfer: 

Oh, I totally agree. With technology, there was, we are also in six countries and you talked about applying there. So I noticed that it is the most important because English is just one of the criteria.

Once people know your language. That’s not enough. So every culture is different and people are saying one thing, but the meaning may be different. Once you start spending some time, you sit down with those people. That’s the only time I grew up in Pakistan and my team is there. But even then, with 27 years in the US that gap is created.

Now I go back, I need to still spend time with the team. To really bring them to, to get to know what they are thinking. So, yes, there is less difference compared to somebody totally new, but it’s still, there is a huge gap that needs to be filled. 

[00:18:40] Philippe: 

Absolutely. And so there’s layers, right?

There’s the cultural layers that you need to get a sense of understanding yourself through your own lived experience and your lens to calibrate. But then you also need to. Put the trusted people in that context. And so, it’s more than just understanding someone, it’s understanding that trusted local source within the context of that new culture that you get to understand.

So there’s a lot of time, it’s paying attention. It’ s being humble and being careful. Yeah. 

[00:19:13] Ghazenfer: 

So as you’re working on a founder campus and you worked with many founders. In your opinion, what’s one question every founder should ask themself but most never do?

[00:19:30] Philippe: 

Well, I think most founders don’t understand themself well enough and they end up, or the entrepreneurial journey, well enough so that they jump in it.

Successful or not, they have a crisis, either of purpose or identity at some point. And so if you’re clear about who you are, why you are, why you want to be an entrepreneur, why this specific venture, you have a level of perspective that really empowers you throughout your journey. And these are very important questions to ask yourself and to ask yourself again and again once in a while, you know, just so that you can remain clear because the one superpower of entrepreneurship is alignment. 

[00:20:16] Ghazenfer: 

True,Yeah. That’s a good reminder to ask again and again. You know how coaches tell us, like, whatever your goal, those should be in your bathroom mirror because it’s the reminder that makes you do things again. Like otherwise you keep forgetting.You just get lazy or you’re just not doing it. 

[00:20:38] Philippe: 

Yeah. And more than the goals, the reason why. And so it’s really, ’cause I think, you know, if you look at Simmons Sinek, it made it popular. Start with why and I think the who, how, and the what. Alright. People question the why of their business. They might ask themselves why they wanna be an entrepreneur and maybe they’re gonna go deeper to, then I wanna make money or I wanna be free.

Maybe there’s. It’s gonna be a deeper understanding. But if they, but most people stop very early in the process and they don’t really think about who they wanna be. They wanna, don’t really wanna think about how this is making my life meaningful or not? And, and so at some point you can die at any point your, you know, entrepreneurship is a hero journey that can give you a better understanding of yourself, a chance to transform into something, a better version of yourself, if you will.

But not necessarily in a growth path, but. In a wise sense and so there’s a lot of treasures in entrepreneurship that can also be poisonous if you have ignorance instead of self-awareness. 

[00:21:40] Ghazenfer: 

Cool. And you mentioned that the most expensive mistake looked like smart decisions at the time. Can you elaborate on that?

[00:21:50] Philippe: 

So I can talk about the $5 million scam that I was a victim of. So it was just after I made a partial exit. So I scaled 70 million. I had a founder conflict. I decided to sell part of my shares as a means, as a way to solve the conflict. So it’s a long story, but all that to remind you that the founder conflict disrupted our capacity to make decisions.

And so my partners wanted us to grow the company sustainably. We had hit the maximum that we could buy from China, so we had to look outside of China. I first looked at Thailand because my now business partner Matt had villa over there and he was, I didn’t know him at the time, but he was the husband of my former colleague when I was, , at the university selling cell phones, you know, my first cell job.

So I explored through my limited contact network and, and eventually reached the limit of that as well. And so, we had begun a sales campaign to gather. Customers that we had the potential to keep after the crisis through an tic business model that we thought we would’ve, a product market fit that would sustain itself beyond the crisis, right?

And so we had orders, we had begun talking with an agent that had contacts in Indonesia that could sell us the products, and it seemed like a very good idea. We would grow the business, it would be stable, we would make more money. And then that channel was established by bridges of trust from people before COVID.

That was in the business. We had sent people on the ground, not us, mistake number one just people that we had paid. We had a third party inspection. All of the things that we should do on paper that looked like a smart thing, but we missed. The sophistication of organized crime, and we got sold.

To this day, it’s not clear if they were all on it or some were on it, but the first loss we had was a fake charter plane. The charter plane company blamed the distributor for not releasing the bills of lading and then vice versa. A year later we realized, well, once we finally received the containers, they were empty.

So. It was just a big scam. It took us 11 months to figure it all out, and it cost a lot of money, but it looked like a good idea. You know, it looked like we were doing the right things but it was motivated by unworthiness that disrupted our sense of risk and our logic, and it led to a terrible outcome.

[00:24:46] Ghazenfer: 

So, one last question. You have served as a judge for competition, like GSEA, where focus isn’t just a business, but on a founder as a person as well. 

[00:24:58]  Philippe: 

Yes 

[00:24:59] Ghazenfer: 

From your perspective, what do young founders need most right now? And then if you wanna tie in to your, like, how you look at those founders when you are investing in those businesses.

[00:25:13] Philippe:

 I think, Well, that‘s so young founders need more knowledge during the inner journey. Obviously otherwise I wouldn’t be doing that company. I think that’s a big gap. That’s the biggest gap there is at all levels of experience. But I think that uncertainty and expectations. It has all to do with the inner journey and understanding what to expect and how.

Where are the traps? It is very important. And then not becoming puppets to the idols of the data tyranny, to the idols of the hustle culture, to the idols of everything is as simple as a playbook because what starts like a side hustle and creates rapidly becomes an entrepreneurial endeavor.

And that’s a whole different beast. It’s a whole different beast from business. It’s a whole different beast from a sideline. So when I look at founders, I look at their founder readiness from the sense that they have the capacity to sustain decision quality because they have the maturity and the perspective.

To understand their state, to understand how they make decisions. Do they understand their ticking patterns? Do they understand their biases? Can they properly assess risk? Do they understand what leverages how to scan for opportunities that make sense? How to filter them? Can they have a strategic thinking process that also takes into factor future bottlenecks?

Are they able to make bets that minimize the downsize? What has exponential upside potentially? Do they understand that grid is more than just persevering until you’re burnt out? That you need cadence, integrity, that your vitality is important because a decision fee does exist and a bad decision costs you way more than a thousand.

You know, rushing a bad decision costs you way more than anything else at the end of the day because. The more you grow, the more power your decision holds, and especially as you have to cross certain crossroads of transformation, like moving from the founder-led sales to being a leader and hiring a team and being in charge of alignment.

If you make that decision, they ripple all over the structure and that costs a lot of money, and this is how now your company’s gonna fail. So as a founder, you need both. You need the skills to understand the growth stage and the rules and the milestones so that you have priority sharpness and focus for the business side.

And you need to have the emotional strength underneath so that you can know if ChatGPT is telling you something you should not pay attention to right now. But that internal compass, that filter. 

[00:28:09] Ghazenfer: 

I think, yeah, it’s so good. Entrepreneurial tips for people, who are looking for investment in their business, which are so, we’ve been talking to Philippe Neil, who has shared such powerful insight from his journey today.

Philippe, where can people learn more about you, about Founders Campus and the work you have been doing with the entrepreneurs? 

[00:28:31] Philippe: 

We have the Founder Readiness Institute that does research on the founder journey. We produce the founder readiness assessment that we’ve just released. So I would encourage you to go to founders compass.com and take the free assessment.

It’s free at the moment. It’s gonna be free for a few months, at the very least and ideally forever. It’s just not decided and then if you want to improve the founder readiness, we have a Mastermind beginning next year which will be for sale on our website. 

[00:29:07] Ghazenfer: 

Is there a name for the Mastermind or is there information already on the website?

[00:29:12] Philippe: 

No, it’s being, it is, well, I don’t know when this is going to be published, but it’s going to be released in October.

[00:29:18] Ghazenfer: 

Okay. So we’ll make sure to include it in the podcast transcription. When we release it. 

[00:29:27] Philippe: 

Perfect. 

[00:29:28] Ghazenfer:

Thanks Philippe. Thanks for your time today. We’re glad to have you on our podcast Lessons from the Leap. 

[00:29:35] Philippe: 

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.